Gentrification -a challange for architects

When reading a lot about city-planning you'll most likely come across the term gentrification - that describes how a low income neighborhood gets transformed to a neighborhood for people with higher income. In that process the former low income inhabitants move out of the neighborhood because they can't afford the cost for living there anymore when the neighborhood gets popular.

I've been thinking about it and I believe that building-architecture play a role in that too, even tough the problem really lies in the hand of urban planners. But if you think of a random development of apartments... Would you think that you'll find any of the apartments in that devopment more luxurious than the others? Maybe a bit more roomy, but not that much more luxurious. This means that someone who's living in this development can't buy a more luxurious home in the same neighborhood if he suddenly could afford a more luxurious living - so he's got to move out of there and probably to any single house with a beautiful garden or a he buys himself into a fashionable tepaniyaki-class lifestyle in an innercity neighborhood.

When we buy a house or an apartment we also buy a lifestyle. Your home becomes a kind of branding of yourself. I believe that one of the big challenges for architecture today, is to make this branding more dependent on architecture than location. Fashionale apartments can't be a fashionable-neighborhood-thing only. Let's mix the fashionable and the unfashionable to make the society more integrated and less unequal.


 -An architect that creates fashionable-living in an unfashionable neighborhood is a good architect.